How much? German würst makers got together and fixed the price of sausages, prompting a €338m fine. Brewers were fined €338m in January for similar practices. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/EPA

It has been quite a year for price-fixing scandals in Germany, but this must be one of the wurst.

Some of the country's biggest food producers have been fined €338m (£267m) for cooking up a plan to fix the price of sausages.

The Federal Cartel Authority (FCA), Germany's competition watchdog, said 21 manufacturers including the country's biggest producer, Zur-Mühlen-Gruppe, had been part of a cartel that had stitched up sausage prices for decades. The Zur-Mühlen-Gruppe has denied the allegations.

"The price-fixing agreements were practised over many years," said the FCA president, Andreas Mund. "The overall amount of fines seems high at first glance but has to be seen in perspective in view of the large number of companies involved, the duration of the cartel, and the billions in turnover achieved in this market."

The fine follows a wave of white-collar crime that has left a bad taste in the mouth of millions of Germans, with sugar producers and brewers also handed large fines for fixing prices.

The sausage cartel has been dubbed the Atlantic Group after the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg where the sausage producers first met. The sausage inquiry was launched after the FCA received an anonymous tip off. The bumper fine will be shared among 33 individuals and 21 producers – some of them household names in Germany such as Böklunder, Wiesenhof and Rügenwalder.

The FCA has handed out record fines totalling more than €900m compared with €240m last year. At the start of this year,11 breweries, including Danish brewer Carlsberg, were fined €338m, while the country's three largest sugar producers also received a €280m fine for price fixing.

In a statement outlining its findings, the FCA said it had evidence of a "basic consensus" among the sausage manufacturers to inform one another about demands for price increases. The cartel met regularly but also reached agreements using "organised ring-round calls", it said. Due to the many different types of sausage – there are more than 1,500 kinds of wurst according to the German Food Guide website – it was not possible to set the price of a particular banger, the cartel office said, so price ranges were agreed for products such as cooked sausage and ham.

The FCA does not give any information about individual fines but said they ranged from a few hundred thousand euros to in the "high" millions. Eleven companies admitted wrongdoing in exchange for reduced fines. The Zur-Mühlen-Gruppe, which makes sausages under the Böklunder and Könecke labels, plans to contest the fines.